With his immensely imaginative and gifted voice, Nam Le brings us a haunting collection of stories that resonate like those of JD Salinger, ZZ Packer, and Canada's own Vincent Lam.
A stunningly inventive fiction debut: stories that take us from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a fishing village in Australia to a floundering vessel in the South China Sea, in a masterful display of literary virtuosity and feeling.
In the magnificent opening story, a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father's experiences in Vietnam—and what seems at first a satire of turning one's life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of the ties between father and son. "Cartagena" provides a visceral glimpse of life in Colombia as a fourteen-year-old hit man faces the ultimate test. In "Meeting Elise" an aging New York painter mourns his body's decline as he prepares to meet his daughter on the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut. The title story returns us to Vietnam, to a fishing trawler crowded with refugees, where a young woman's bond with a mother and her small son forces both women to a harrowing decision.
My father arrived on a rainy morning. I was dreaming about a poem, the dull thluck thluck of a typewriter's keys punching out the letters. It was a good poem-perhaps the best I'd ever written. When I woke up, he was standing outside my bedroom door, smiling ambiguously. He wore black trousers and a wet, wrinkled parachute jacket that looked like it had just been pulled out of a washing machine. Framed by the bedroom doorway, he appeared even smaller, gaunter, than I remembered. Still groggy with dream, I lifted my face toward the alarm clock.
"What time is it?"
"Hello, Son," he said in Vietnamese. "I knocked for a long time. Then the door just opened."
The fields are glass, I thought. Then tum-ti-ti, a dactyl, end line, then the words excuse and alloy in the line after. Come on, I thought.
"It's raining heavily," he said.
I frowned. The clock read 11:44. "I thought you weren't coming until this afternoon." It felt strange, after all this time, to be speaking Vietnamese again.
"They changed my flight in Los Angeles."
"Why didn't you ring?"
"I tried," he said equably. "No answer."
